The iconography of folly in the sixteenth century

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At the beginning of the sixteenth century, Europe faced fundamental changes, and ideas that had previously been taken for granted were being questioned. The late middle ages mark an era in which the Church gradually lost its spiritual prestige, institutions of education and politics were declining, and dominant notions of philosophy and cosmology were being questioned. Uncertainty was the most central experience of this transitory period, which is shown by the vast popularity of pieces of art and literature depicting folly. Although the notion of folly was already present in the Middle Ages, in works such as Nigel Wireker’s Speculum Stultorum (A Mirror of Fools, 1179–1180) or John Lydgate’s Order of Fools (1475), from the beginning of the sixteenth century its use in visual arts and literature became increasingly widespread in Europe. This “fool boom” owes much to the publication of two influential works: Sebastian Brant’s picture book, The Ship of Fools (Das Narrenschiff, 1494), and Erasmus’s mock oration, The Praise of Folly (Moriae Encomium, 1509). The Ship of Fools is an enumeration of fools with 112 chapters in verse depicting types of folly on the analogy of the medieval seven deadly sins. Each verse is accompanied by a woodcut which exhibits a fool or a group of fools relevant to the chapters. Erasmus’s The Praise of Folly is a quasi-monologue delivered by Mother Folly, in which she characterises the notion of folly and also enumerates types.

Both The Ship of Fools and The Praise of Folly are continental works translated into English in the sixteenth century, and the numerous references to them in English literature suggest that these pieces explored some fundamental issues which contemporary English readers could relate to. The main concern of this paper is to map the notion of folly on the basis of two visual representations present in these works: a woodcut in The Ship of Fools, and an illustration by Hans Holbein the Younger sketched on the margin of the 1515 edition of The Praise of Folly. The iconographic significance of these images lies in their depiction of identity by displaying the mirror device and emphasising the act of self-reflection. In order to demonstrate this, I shall discuss the significance of the medieval speculum (mirror) literature, the mirror metaphor in Renaissance Europe, and finally I propose a comparative analysis of the two visual representations in question.

Mirror Literature in the Middle Ages and Beyond

Mirror or speculum literature, through which authors could compile encyclopaedic knowledge, was widespread all over Europe from the thirteenth century. The mirror

genre was usually centred on one issue, such as alchemy (Speculum Alchemiae, Mirror of Alchemy by Roger Bacon), or astronomy (Speculum Astronomiae, Mirror of Astronomy by Albertus Magnus), and it was used like a “survey,” containing the most fundamental contemporaneous findings in a given discipline. Nigel Wireker’s Speculum Stultorum (The Mirror for Fools, ca. 1179–1180) was an example of mirror literature which provided a lengthy catalogue of human folly in the form of medieval beast narratives in order to mock the Church, social institutions, and eventually human nature. Its protagonist is a donkey called Brunellus who, being dissatisfied with the length of his tail, sets out on a journey to have it lengthened. He goes through various adventures, and in the end the text draws the conclusion that nobody can escape their nature.

Mirror literature remained a popular genre in the early modern period and many literary pieces were published in England with the words “mirror” or “looking-glass” in the title. Such works were the Mirror for Magistrates, a collection of stories about the fall of princes and nobilities (based on Boccaccio’s De Casibus Virorum Illustrium, “On the Fates of Famous Men”, 1355–1374), which had several editions published in the sixteenth century, such as Anthony Munday’s Mirrour of Mutabilitie (1579). Early modern mirror literature was also encyclopaedic and similarly provided catalogues of various subjects. Additionally, the texts were also often concerned with confronting their readers with their own flaws. In the Mirror for Magistrates, for instance, the reader faces the unavoidability of the whims of Fortune, and is reminded that even the mighty fall; the text therefore reflects on the mutability of human existence. Herbert Grabes points out that pieces of mirror literature, when combined with satire, also offer the opportunity to face one’s faults and thus to be aware of them.

Reflection is possible only while the object faces the mirror and the observer is looking at it (Grabes 111). Mirror images are temporary and hence the mirror is a fitting device to grasp the essence of folly, which in The Ship of Fools is applied to depict the fleeting nature of life.

Brant defines his work declaring that “[for] fools a mirror it shall be, / Where each his counterfeit may see” (trans. Zeydel 31). Each chapter of his work might be seen as a mirror in which the folly of the reader may be contemplated, offering an opportunity for gaining wisdom. Although Erasmus does not define his The Praise of Folly explicitly as a piece of mirror literature, Holbein’s illustration to the 1515 authorised edition implies that it might also be seen as a piece which is deeply concerned with identity and self-reflection. I elaborate on this in the last section of the paper, but in order to gain a deeper insight into how the mirror device was exploited in the early modern era, I propose a brief theoretical discussion of it beforehand.

The Mirror Metaphor in the Renaissance

The mirror was a frequently employed metaphor in early modern literature. Herbert Grabes points out that this was the period when the ancient art of making glass mirrors became widespread in Europe. By the end of the fifteenth century Venetian

glass-manufacturers made their inexpensive, small-format looking glasses available to the general public. Manufacture of glass mirrors spread swiftly in Germany, Flanders, France, and England. They were first installed in churches, then in secular buildings, and finally, by the seventeenth century, they became the visual centres of halls and palaces (Grabes 4–5). Grabes also suggests that the widespread vogue for mirrors generated a variety of literary/metaphoric conventions (8). He is certainly right in asserting that the emergence of mirror manufacturing coincided with the increasing popularity of the mirror as a literary device, however, the frequent artistic application of the mirror was not merely due to the popularity of the object itself. The mirror image had been present as a metaphor since classical times, centuries before the technique of producing mirrors was perfected so that mass production could begin.

Yet, the collision of the epistemological crisis at the turn of the sixteenth century and the mirror manufacturing boom might suggest that there was an increasing interest in self-reflection and search for identity in late-medieval/Renaissance Europe.¹

The construction of identity was taken to a new artistic level in the Renaissance, as illustrated by Stephen Greenblatt’s notion of “self-fashioning,” which refers to the creation of a public persona according to the expectations of a given community. Greenblatt argues that the early modern period marks an intellectual, social, psychological, and aesthetic change, which is closely related to the urge to govern identity (Greenblatt 1). Autonomy, he argues, was not a central aspect of art in this era; rather, art was embedded in specific communities, social structures, and structures of power (7). The constructed identity could thus be seen as the reflection of the community it was created in; this community determined the identity of the individual and such individuals may be regarded as the shifting mirror images of each other.

On the basis of Greenblatt’s argumentation, it may be assumed that identity was collective in the Renaissance and hence the public persona e of individuals may be seen as the reflections of each other and of society at large. And yet, such personae were not fully identical. Debora Shuger suggests that in the Renaissance the image of one’s self was not conceived as identical to the self, only like it, a similar other. The early modern mirror functions according to similitude rather than difference; it reflects those whom one resembles (37). The reflection and the observer who looks into the mirror are not conceived as completely identical, and the qualitative difference between them, as Grabes argues, brings the latter to self-knowledge and triggers possible reforms or progress (Grabes 81). Grabes discusses the ontological distinction between the mirror-image and the reflected object and emphasises that a mirror can reflect the image of anything it is confronted with. The mirror-image, however, is only an image and not the re-creation of the original; hence the reflection lacks fixed identity (109). The reflection has no image of its own, it depends on the material object it mirrors (111). Grabes refers to one of Chaucer’s

1 Up to the late-fifteenth century there are about three hundred Speculum titles in Europe, not taking into account the vernacular titles, and about half of these can be convincingly substantiated for England (Grabes 29).

short poems “Against Women Unconstant,” which emphasises the passivity and the transience of the mirror:

Right as a mirour nothing may enpresse But, lightly as it cometh, so mot it pace,

So fareth your love, your werkes bereth witnesse. (qtd. in Grabes 111) The reflection exists only while the object faces the mirror and the observer is looking at it. Thus, the mirror metaphor can express the transience of life, of love, of the affection of false friends, and of earthly delights (Grabes 111). The interrelation between folly and transience will be discussed in more detail at the end of this paper;

at this point suffice it to say that fools are characters of transgression and they are fluid, which enables them to exhibit transience similarly to mirrors. In the following section let us consider two visual representations of folly in Brant’s The Ship of Fools and Erasmus’s The Praise of Folly, both of which capture the problematic nature of identity by applying the mirror device.

“The Mirror up to Nature”

Sebastian Brant’s Das Narrenschiff may be considered a “literary symptom” of the epistemological crisis that characterised the turn of the sixteenth century. It was first published in 1494 and had several authorised and pirated editions during Brant’s lifetime (both in High and Low German). The Latin and French editions were used by the English translators: Alexander Barclay, who produced a verse translation (The Shyp of Folys, 1509, 1570), and Henry Watson (The Shyppe of Fooles, 1509, 1507), whose prose translation was printed by Wynkyn de Worde’s press. The Ship of Fools left its literary hallmark on numerous early modern English texts, and by the end of the sixteenth century the title of the work was commonly used as a metaphor.² The massive popularity of The Ship of Fools owes much to the accompanying woodcuts produced under the supervision of Albrecht Dürer, placed at the beginning of each chapter depicting a fool or a group of fools. The images and the verses work in dialogue with each other, resulting in a complexity of meaning.

The Ship of Fools enumerates various types of fools and suggests that there is a seemingly endless variety of folly in the world. The encyclopaedic format of the medieval speculum tradition is satirised in the work, as it attempts to catalogue folly by implying an analogy with the seven deadly sins, emphasising various forms of human weakness. The work proposes such categories for folly as “Of great borowers

& slacke players,” or “Of the superflue curyosyte of men.” These categories mock the

2 Its influence can be detected in such Elizabethan/Jacobean dramas as Thomas Nashe’s Summer’s Last Will and Testament, Thomas Dekker’s The Whore of Babylon, John Marston’s The Fawn. Additionally, there are textual references to The Ship in such representative Renaissance texts as Thomas Nashe’s preface to Sir Philip Sidney’s first edition of Astrophil and Stella (1591), Gabriel Harvey’s Pierces Supererogation (1593), Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), and Robert Fludd’s Mosaicall Philosophy (1659).

aim of medieval speculum literature which attempts to set up valid categories in given fields to order and structure various phenomena in the world. It is arguable that the arbitrary categorisation of folly in The Ship of Fools reflects deep uncertainties about any attempt to describe the world based on such thematic distinctions.

The first edition of Erasmus’s The Praise of Folly was as a mock-sermon delivered by Mother Folly, in which she gives an account of the foolishness of human beings.³ The text appeared in numerous editions during Erasmus’ lifetime in France, Germany, Italy, and The Netherlands. The Latin version had already been available in England and enjoyed enormous popularity when the English version was published in 1549, translated by one of Erasmus’s students, Thomas Chaloner. Peter Happé argues that Erasmus’s work had considerable impact on early modern drama and he regards the relatively sudden appearance and the deepening awareness of the theatricality of the fool on the sixteenth-century English stage as an effect of the success of The Praise of Folly (74). The fool appealed so much to Renaissance dramatists probably because its character was fluid and it could represent a number of conflicting perspectives on stage. This fluidity of identity is also central to the visual representations attached to the works of Brant and Erasmus.

In Brant’s chapter ‘Of nevve fasions and disguised garmentes’ the woodcut depicts a fool and a courtier holding the same mirror. The mirror is placed in the middle of the image and it is difficult to tell whether it reflects the image of the fool or the courtier. The courtier resembles the fool in his garment too: he is wearing a hood with bells, looking like the donkey’s ears hat on the fool’s head.⁴ The verse to the image reads:

Who that newe garmentes loues or deuyses. Or weryth by his symple wyt, and vanyte Gyuyth by his foly and unthryfty gyses Moche yl example to yonge Comontye. (The Shyp of Folys, xix/v, trans. Barclay)

The woodcut mocks the construction of a fashionable public persona and declares those attempting to adopt artificial identities fools. In this chapter of The Ship of Fools the word “counterfeit,” a synonym for “imitate,” occurs several times, and the text reveals that by imitation courtiers often make fools of themselves. Brant condemns the aping of new fashions as “this disgysing […] / As I remember it was brought out of France” (The Shyp of Folys, xxi/r) and explains the reasons for condemnation in the chapter’s opening address:

3 The text was first published in Paris by Gilles de Gourmont. Michael Andrew Screech points out that the year of the publication is dubious since it bears no date on the title page (Screech, 1). He suggests that the dates of 1509 and 1515 are misleading. These are usually considered as the first publication dates; however, the original Latin text was considerably enlarged shortly after the first publication. This enlarged version became the text we know today, and it was probably published at Scheuer of Strasbourg’s publishing house in 1514. Scheuer expanded and republished the text in the same year (Screech, xix).

4 The image resembles the title page of the 1499 edition of Wireker’s Speculum Stultorum, in which a fool holds up a mirror to Brunellus, the ass, in which he can confront his own foolish self.

Drawe nere ye Courters and Galants disgised Ye counterfayt Caytifs, that ar nat content As god hath you made: his warke is despysed Ye thynke you more crafty than God onipotent.

Unstable is your mynde: that shewes by your garment.

A fole is knowen by his toyes and his Cote.

(The Shyp of Folys xix/v)

The text suggests that imitating others is foolish as it means giving up the assets of God. The fool in the woodcut confronts the courtier with his own reflection; however, the mirror displays not only the folly of the courtier, but that of society too, mirrored in the image of the courtier. This manifold mirroring structure multiplies the layers of meaning, especially when one considers that the woodcut, eventually, was meant to reflect the reader.

In this chapter of The Ship of Fools the mirror clearly refers to the act of mindless imitation by which one can easily become a fool. But as a result, it also raises the issue of identity, which is constructed and deconstructed through imitation.

Imitation enables the adoption of a desired image of the self, yet imitation also

“disguises” and even modifies the already existing identity. Mirrors can show objects from opposite angles, and are therefore fitting devices to unmask folly. In this respect, they are analogous to the character of the fool, whose main aim is to turn the world upside down. The mirror in the woodcut is the visual device by which the identities of the courtier and the fool become blurred and interchangeable. They are linked to each other by their reflections, to the extent that one cannot tell which one of them holds up the mirror to the other.

Erasmus’s The Praise of Folly offers an interesting opportunity for comparison.

While this was not originally a picture book, the 1515 edition contains marginal illustrations by Hans Holbein the Younger, which depict types of fools inspired by Erasmus’s text. These illustrations became so popular in the sixteenth century that they were included in further reprints, and they were most probably available in England.⁵ In one of Holbein’s sketches a young man is looking at a mirror, in which his reflection is poking its tongue out at him. The man in the image is wearing a hood slung around his neck and his garment is decorated with bells. Although by his facial expression, and because his hood is not on his head, one cannot tell if he is a fool or not, his reflection is rather telling and confronts the man with his alternative foolish self. Fritz Saxl remarks that Holbein’s illustration focuses on the faces of both characters, which suggests that the designer did not consider the fool as a type; rather he was interested in folly as depicted in a facial expression. The young man scrutinising his own face is the visual representation of one’s search for identity (Saxl

5 Holbein worked in England for years, he was involved in the humanist circle of Sir Thomas More, he enjoyed the patronage of Anne Boleyn, and he was the court painter of Henry VIII. He was introduced to the English humanist elite by Erasmus who was a highly popular and distinguished humanist writer.

In 1628 Milton remarks that one would find Erasmus’s The Praise of Folly “in everyone’s hands” at Cambridge (qtd. in Kaiser 23, originally quoted in Patterson 220).

276). Saxl adds that Erasmus commented on The Praise of Folly saying that “I too have been revealed to myself in the mirror” (qtd. in Saxl 276).⁶ Even though it is impossible to prove that Holbein knew of this remark, The Praise of Folly could be

In document HUSSE 11: Proceedings of the 11th Conference of the Hungarian Society for the Study of English (Pldal 193-200)